The business world’s riskiest user

Now, every element of that story in and of itself is already incredible. But what made our jaws truly drop was the revelation that the teen discovered sensitive CIA data in the Director’s personal email. It turns out the Director had been emailing work documents to his personal account.

If it’s any consolation, the Director is not alone. In Intermedia’s 2015 Insider Risk Report, 2,000+ office workers were surveyed about their data security habits. We learned, for example, that 22% of Baby Boomers like Director Brennan have emailed company information to their personal email address.

What’s worse, though, is that 30% of Millennials have done the same thing.

And that brings us to the heart of Intermedia’s 2015 Insider Risk Report. We sliced our data by demographics—age, profession, job tenure, business size, and industry—and we learned that the riskiest users are young, experienced people who work in IT.

People who should know better. Essentially, the most tech-savvy employees are most likely to create risk.

Intermedia’s report is intended to give you a better understanding of the scope of the insider threat problem: that every employee with access to sensitive or confidential information (97% of those surveyed) is a potential risk to your company. And to alert you to the fact that, for many workers, attitudes toward security need improvement.